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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Experiences
Songs
Humanity
Wisdom
Story
Construct
Song
Constructs
Stories
Legacy
Precious

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
Doris Lessing
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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing
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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
Doris Lessing
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
Doris Lessing
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Doris Lessing
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Doris Lessing
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
Doris Lessing
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
Doris Lessing
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
Doris Lessing
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
Doris Lessing
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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Doris Lessing
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
Doris Lessing
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For there is never any way to go but in.
Doris Lessing
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
Doris Lessing